I bought a small bottle of 120K 'Da Bomb Beyond Insanity' sauce 5 years ago. While I used to buy 2 bottles of regular Tabasco at $3 each per year - needing full tablespoons to season my food - this $10 bottle is only about 15% gone now, and still good. It may last the rest of my life...

HPLC is used in the Industry to test Chiles the cost is still rather prohibitive for the average grower..
Trust me I know I was a List member on the now it seems defunct Chileheads List for 10 years..
I currently am growing Houston USA sourced Tepins here in OZ (why because the little shits are hard to grow, and I take it as a Personal Challenge".. FWIW i won 2 out of three local Chile Eating contests here, first time was 1 15 oz glass of blended chiles Habanero's included second time was 12 Habaneros , third time as defending champ i was nobbled by being made to take a small tub of Extract based sauced probably 350k scovies before participating and even then the guy who beat me swallowed several Habaneros whole.. "we were supposed to chew them for the ammusement of the 2000+ crowd..
FWIW Blairs Death sauce brand has more flavour than Daves, Std disclaimers apply although I did have snail mail intercourse with Blair Lazar once in 95-96..
A Fireman mate of mine Jim Campbell in Franklin Indiana does a mean apple smoked habanero Flake and lots of other products, no disclaimer apply here as he does send me a care package of new products from time to time
Luke in OZ

If anyone wants to read a pretty fascinating book on one man's disovery (or rediscovery, as it were) of the pepper, look up Amal Naj's "Peppers." C. 1992; ISBN 0-679-74427-4. It's a good a read as any, though may be a bit dated now. I think it holds up and is still a substantial store of knowledge and information for me...

Hey all, I am now the food science intern at the company that makes the worlds hottest hot sauce. Original Juan Specialty Foods makes "The Source" registering at 7.1 million scoville units, making it nearly half pure capsaicin and somewhere near tear gas. We send most of our product off to get tested for on the scoville scale and actually part of what I'm doing here is figuring out the feasability of doing it in house. You can get all of our products online (including the above mentioned Da Bomb) at http://www.originaljuan.com

{Just testing to see if the admin forgot to turn off the priveleges for 'other' people to edit 'guest' posts. If so, then the admin will need to turn off this feature. - Kenny}

{update....yes...this is no good, I will have to inform the admin to fix this up...it means others can change this message too. Not good.}

Last edited by Guest on Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:36 am; edited 2 times in total

For a more reliable but not as cool source, try a chemical supply company that will gladly sell you a gram of synthetic capsaicin for around $650 (natural will run you $950): Fisher Scientific
Finally, here's a list of manufacturers of pure capsaicin:
Buyers Guide Chem

I notice that some people say that an already intense hot-sauce is not as hot as another kind. So I'm kind of wondering if the solution to fix that is to simply increase the quantity of the hot sauce that one deems to be 'less-hot'. For example, if somebody thinks a drop of dave's ultimate insanity sauce is not hot enough, then putting 10 drops into their mouth should do the trick ... right? And a good swish around the mouth should also help to get that capsaicin working really good on the taste buds too.

It is important to realize the difference between a basic jalapeno and a chipotle. Obviously the main difference is that a chipotle is smoked, but it does not stop there. To make a chipotle pepper, the fruit is picked when it is ripe. That means that it is red, has a more mature flavor, and has a higher heat content (many people believe that red peppers are not as hot, but they are actually hotter; more sweetness causes the confussion). When sold as jalapenos, the peppers are picked while still green and just beginning to "cork" (the brown lines on the outside of the pepper).

Thus the chipotle pepper (being ripe) is hotter than the green jalapeno. Drying the pepper serves to increase the heat as a ratio of mass, but scoville units are a measure of capsaicin capacity, not ration so drying the pepper does not change the scoville rating.

Googling pepper types this afternoon instead of working seems to demonstrate that (A.)there is always something better to do then work, and (B.) there seem to be some regional differences in names.

We have a type of pepper that grows down here on the isthmus of Panama commonly called a pico de pajaro, but if that term is used as a search term a completely different type of pepper is what comes up on google.

What we call pico de pajaro here in panama is a very small, roundish pepper which grows wild and is very hot.

During junior high I did a science experiment where I used a calorimeter and measured the crystallization time of the capsaicin in various chili vinegar mixtures. My equipment wasn't so great so the results were crude. However, using the data I was able to correctly order the chillies where scovile placed them.